“I’m sorry, Stella.”Her brow furrow

“I’m sorry, Stella.”
Her brow furrows. “Did I … do something wrong?”
If you call too fucking perfect “wrong,” then yes. She’s as wrong as they come. “No, not at all. This is just … I don’t know. I think the nest is messing with our minds. We shouldn’t have nested. Or maybe we need to establish proper nest protocol. You know, nest boundaries.” There. Back on track. Light and easy.
An uncertain smile flickers on her face, and it makes me ache. I’ve hurt her, but she’s trying not to show it. She wanted this. She—no. She doesn’t know what she wants, and I took advantage of that. Now I’m going to fix it. I lean down and kiss her forehead. “We should read.”
“Right,” she says in a strained voice, then wipes her swollen lips with the back of her hand. “We should read.” She gets up and grabs Great Expectations from the floor in front of the hearth, then flips to the first page. She clears her throat. “‘My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip…’”
She reads until her voice is too raspy to continue, and then I take over. It siphons away the tension word by word, and as Stella’s body relaxes, mine does, too. I don’t know how or when this happened, but now there is this invisible thread that connects us, and if she’s tense, I can feel it inside.
We read for hours, until we’re hoarse and ravenous. We eat crackers and roast marshmallows for dinner, then head down to her room with flashlights, because at this point it’s pitch black outside. I sit on her bed and try not to think about what she looks like naked while she changes into pajamas and brushes her teeth in her bathroom. She comes out in a different pair of yoga pants and a t-shirt, and what the hell she’s not wearing a bra … I try not to notice when her nipples poke at the fabric of her shirt, though my eyes keep sliding over to them like they’re magnetized. She seems to have no idea what that does to me.  She’s smiling and joking as she finds me my own toothbrush in one of the guest suites. We also creep down to her dad’s room, and she goes in and gets me a white undershirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants.
We’re having a slumber party. Nothing more innocent than that.
If I get hard in these pants, there’s no way I’ll be able to hide it.
I almost stay in my jeans, but that would probably be weird. So I change, and when I join Stella in the hall I’m thinking of marshmallows and trees and all the work I’m going to have to do to finish my show pieces before Sunday. The gallery owner will understand why I didn’t get them to her today, but if I push it past the weekend, she’s going to know I’m not ready.
We settle into the nest, and with a shy smile, Stella curls up at the edge nearest the fire like she’s trying to give me space. As much as I want to pull her over to me, tuck her head into the crook of my neck, and wrap my arm over her waist, I don’t. Because if I do, it’ll start all over again, this stupid craving that I can’t shake, and it’ll confuse both of us. So I settle in on my half of the nest and close my eyes. I don’t fall asleep until Stella’s muscles go slack and her breaths become long and slow and deep.